404 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



differentiate its various types. But it showed itself then, as it still 

 remains, fatal in a greater proportion of cases than any other disease 

 to which humanity is subject. 



The distribution of its germs through the Mediterranean lands was 

 quickly accomplished. In the fall of 1347 Constantinople was more 

 than decimated. The shores of the ^gean were quickly infected, and 

 before the close of the year Sicily, the cities and towns of southern 

 Italy, and all the ports of the Adriatic were alike prostrate under the 

 scourge. A Sicilian tells how "a most deadly pestilence sprang 

 up over the entire island. It happened that in the month of October, 

 in the year of our Lord 1347, about the beginning of the month, twelve 

 Genoese ships flying from the divine vengeance which our Lord for 

 their sins had sent upon them, put into the port Messina, bringing 

 with them such a sickness clinging to their very bones that, did anyone 

 speak to them, he was directly struck with a mortal siclcness from which 

 there was no escape. Flight profited nothing, for the sickness already 

 contracted and clinging to the fugitives was only carried wherever they 

 sought refuge. Some of those who fled fell on the roads and dragged 

 themselves to die in the fields, the woods, the valleys." 



By the springtime the storm had spent its fury in the south of 

 Italy, but it had passed on northward. It was in April of 1348, 

 Boccaccio tells us, that the malady appeared in the fair city of Florence. 

 There while human nature was resolved into its most primitive ele- 

 ments, as he describes in the introduction to the Decameron, his little 

 group of story tellers gathered in a country house about two miles out- 

 side of the city trying to avoid the pestilence, or at least to make what 

 time should remain pass more cheerfully in the recounting of sad or 

 merry tales. The occasional pathos, the frequent salacity, and the 

 unvarying humor and grace of the tales stand out boldly in Boccaccio's 

 setting of them against the dark background of the mournful re- 

 membrance of that most fatal plague so terrible yet in the memories 

 of us all. In the city the sick were lying deserted by friends, family, 

 servants, physicians and even by the priest, as implacable death crept 

 upon them ; palaces stood deserted and unfastened, jewels and rich gar- 

 ments Ijdng unguarded, except by the dread of infection; the bodies 

 of the dead were being hastily dragged from the houses, carried to 

 the cemeteries and deposited in long rows in pits, with no bells rung, 

 no rites said, no solemn chant or mourning of friends; while outside 

 the city the story tellers of the Decameron were passing away the time 

 governed by the one rule that none should bring to them any news of 

 the plague-stricken outer world. 



Not only Boccaccio in Florence, but Petrarch in Parma, writes in 

 the midst of the plague: "Where are now our pleasant friends? 

 Where the loved faces? Where their cheering words? Where their 



